Page 2. Hopes and reality

The move to towns and cities provided new opportunities
for Māori, but there were drawbacks as well.

Employment and education

Urban centres offered better paid jobs, although in the
main, the first wave of arrivals were poorly educated and
took up unskilled manual work. Such jobs would always be
vulnerable in times of economic downturn. Māori found
themselves engaged in clothing factories, on the wharves, in
the freezing works, in the transport services, and the city
municipal works. Others went into the teaching services, and
into government departments, particularly the Department of
Māori Affairs. A number of young school leavers found their
way to the cities through educational opportunities,
including the trade training schemes promoted by the
Department of Māori Affairs until the 1970s.

The challenges of city life

The change from life in small communities where everybody
knew what everybody else was doing, to the strangeness and
anonymity of the city, called for rapid re-adjustment. Some
people flourished, establishing successful careers and
enjoying the advantages that the city had to offer, but never
losing links with their home communities. Others, however,
had more of a struggle.

Harsh realities

In 1961 the magazine Te Ao Hou gave the
following warning to its Māori readers:

‘Life in the city is not easy: you have to work
regularly, be very careful with money, accommodation often
gives trouble, and friends and relations have a habit of
getting themselves into difficulties you have to help them
out of.’1

Housing

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the major difficulty was
finding suitable accommodation. In Auckland numerous migrants
were forced to live in the then depressed inner-city areas of
Freemans Bay, Ponsonby and Herne Bay. Guest houses and
hostels, such as Waipapa in Auckland, Te Rāhui in Hamilton
and Rēhua in Christchurch, were established. The Department
of Māori Affairs also made housing available in the better
suburbs of Auckland and elsewhere, in accordance with a
policy of ‘pepper potting’ or scattering and integrating
individual Māori families among Pākehā
neighbours. This was preferred to placing Māori together into
one area.

However, the numbers burgeoned and eventually families
were allocated state-built homes in large housing estates
such as Te Atatū, Ōtara, and Māngere in Auckland, and
Porirua, Hutt Valley, and Wainuiomata in Wellington. These
suburbs grew into Māori communities.

Social problems

Having to take on permanent jobs and meet financial
commitments, many Māori had difficulty in accepting the
constraints of their new situation. With no extended family
to fall back on, the growing and predominantly young group
inevitably faced problems. Unemployment, loneliness and
antisocial behaviour came to characterise city life for far
too many young people. Some ended up on the streets and in
gangs. This social dislocation was depicted in Alan Duff’s
1990 novel, Once were warriors (which was made into
a film in 1994).

Social upheaval

Pita Sharples, one of the founders of Hoani Waititi
urban marae,
describes the social problems he observed among Māori who
came to live in Auckland in the 1950s and 60s:

‘The change from the rural to an urban way of life was a
huge culture shock. So many families were soon run down and
the children were in trouble. They were broke, they had
their power and water cut off, they owed rates and stuff
like this. The discipline of the city was totally different
from the discipline of the country. So there were huge
problems.’ 2

Maintaining identity

From the beginning, people brought with them their
traditions and values. They kept in contact with their home
communities, made occasional return visits and took their
dead home for burial. Increasingly though, the demands of
city life and the pressures of conforming to Pākehā ways made
it difficult for many to maintain that relationship over long
distances, often hundreds of kilometres. Others had firmly
planted their roots in the city and were less disposed to
keep up that contact.

The new generation

The connection was even more tenuous for countless
offspring of the migrants who were far removed from, and thus
out of touch with, the tribal origins of their parents and
grandparents. In the city they were separated from their
marae and all the
traditions that constituted their tribal identity. They
generally did not have their elders to guide and instruct
them in ‘being Māori’. Because they had not grown up within
the tribe they did not have the same sense of yearning to ‘go
back home’. A rising generation looked Māori, but could not
speak the language and knew little or nothing about their
heritage and traditions.